Your nervous system is constantly looking for signals of safety or danger and interpreting whether to activate protective strategies vs allowing you to relax into the feelings of safety and connection.

When your nervous system interprets danger it moves into sympathetic hyper arousal that allows you to fight or flee for safety. This is helpful if you actually need this mobilization for safety. But sometimes unresolved trauma or anxiety leads to chronic nervous system activation that no longer needed, and our nervous systems do not thrive when we are in a chronically hyper aroused state.

The chronic activation of this stress pathway can contribute to anxiety and increased risk of health problems such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

Another way your nervous system might try to access safety in the face of potential threat is to shut down or detach and move into a survival state of hypo arousal. This may lead to flattening, feeling emotionless or disconnected, checking out through “doom scrolling,” substance use/abuse, or binging too much food or too many video games or chronic shopping/buying things. “Going somewhere else” in your mind and/or behavior might become a way to creatively “escape” when there seems to be no other escape.

While this detachment may have once been a helpful strategy survive, it may now be the thing that interferes with your ability to be present in the current moment and engaged in relationships and the world around you.

As we evaluate your level of actual safety along with your felt sense of safety, we become able to support your ability to change your circumstances, if needed, to establish actual safety. Once we have established true safety in your environment, we can support your nervous system to align with feelings safety.